"Supporting" the troops

"Supporting" the troops
by Joan McCarter
Sun Aug 08, 2010 at 10:09:04 AM PDT
My first job out of college was with then-Rep. Ron Wyden, in his district office in Portland. I was a caseworker, there to help constituents work their way through the maze of federal agencies when something had gone wrong. One of my permanent, and pointless, assignments was the military; pointless because the Pentagon was little influenced by a member from Oregon who didn't sit on any relevant committees. My efforts were mostly limited to finding lost paperwork, trying to expedite emergency leave requests, that kind of thing.

There was one category of military cases that the casework staff split up on a rotating basis--veterans' work. We had to split it up for our own well-being, both because of the volume of cases and because of how emotionally draining they could be. We weren't in a war at the time, and didn't have returning vets needing our help. But the fight of Vietnam vets for recognition of disabilities from Agent Orange exposure to PTSD was in full swing. VA Medical Centers around the country were understaffed, underfunded and in some instances, the worst place to try to receive medical care. At the time, I didn't know any veterans of real war. Somehow no close relatives or family friends had gotten the call to serve in Vietnam. My memories of that war were hazy, as I was pretty young through the worst of it and shielded for the most part from those images Walter Cronkite broadcast every night into our homes. But I held the prevailing sentiment of kids raised by liberals in the sixties, seventies, and eighties--the Vietnam war was a mistake on many grounds, but I didn't get the individual sacrifice part, the real impact it had on the men who had to serve there until I started working on these cases.
read more here
Supporting the troops